As drug planes get seized, cartels adapt

CULIACAN, Mexico - At an airport on Mexico's Pacific coast sits one of the most curious air fleets ever assembled.

Dozens of confiscated drug planes sit wing to wing on the tarmac, parked here by Mexican authorities who are trying to knock the drug cartels out of the air with U.S. help.

Since 2006, authorities have seized more than 400 drug planes - a fleet bigger than the Mexican air force itself - and in February arrested a man accused of managing the Sinaloa cartel's air operations.

But despite the crackdown here, there are signs that Latin America's drug smugglers are finding new ways to ply the airways: using jets to ship tons of cocaine to West Africa, ultralight craft to skim across the U.S. border and satellite-tracking devices to drop and find drug shipments.

Secret airlines

In Mexico, the main corridor for drugs headed to the United States, a rare visit to the army's collection of drug planes shows how smugglers have been adapting their fleets to counter President Felipe Calderón's 3-year-old crackdown on the drug cartels.

Gone are the days when twin-engine planes could fly directly from Colombia to staging areas in northern Mexico. Those long-range flights raise too much suspicion on radar.

Now, cocaine shipments arrive in Guatemala and are brought into Mexico by land or boat, the Mexican Attorney General's Office says. Small planes then move the drugs northward to avoid the army checkpoints that have sprouted across Mexico's highways.

Drug pilots now must land in more-rugged areas because the government has destroyed 2,086 unregistered airfields since 2006.

As a result, almost all the seized planes at the Culiacan airport are Cessna 205s, 206s or 210s: single-engine planes that can haul a lot of weight and have high wings ideal for landing on dirt roads or in desert washes.

"They're like a Volkswagen Beetle - they take a lot of abuse," Alvarez said.

At any given time, the army has about 100 seized planes at the airport, he said. Eventually the confiscated planes are auctioned off or given to government agencies to use.

Many of the aircraft have modified wings so they can take off from short strips, or metal plates attached under the nose to protect the engine from gravel. Some have homemade fuel tanks behind the seats or extra-big tires for landing on rocky terrain.

One home-built plane with folding wings is painted to look like a Federal Police aircraft, with blue-and-white markings and the Mexican government crest on the sides.

Small planes are used mainly for ferrying drug loads to the Mexican side of the border, where they are then taken into the United States by land.

However, smugglers are increasingly transferring shipments to ultralights, simple aircraft made from aluminum tubes and fabric, to actually cross the border. Ultralights are slower and can't carry much fuel, but they are harder to detect on radar than other aircraft and can land and take off on strips of land as short as 100 feet.

Three ultralights with drugs on board have crashed in Arizona since late 2008. And on Oct. 6, a Border Patrol agent reported seeing an ultralight fly over the border near San Luis, Ariz., drop 176 pounds of drugs and then fly back into Mexico. The aircraft was not caught.

The United States has pledged millions of dollars to help Mexico better track drug flights as part of the Mérida Initiative anti-drug aid package.

It is upgrading Mexico's Cessna Citation chase planes with better sensors, buying four CASA 235 patrol planes for the Mexican navy and giving as many as 16 helicopters to the Mexican army and Federal Police.

The Mexican government claimed a key victory against drug planes in February with the arrest of José "Wild Boar" Vázquez Villagrán, who police say was the main dispatcher for airplanes operated by the Sinaloa cartel.

Prosecutors said Vázquez would pick up drug shipments and temporarily stash them at several ranches he owned around Santa Ana, near the Arizona border. They seized three of his airplanes when they arrested him.

"We've cut a lot of their capacity to move around," Alvarez said.

Atlantic airways

But even as authorities claim progress in grounding drug planes in Mexico, the cartels are using aircraft to exploit new routes.

Drug flights between South America and the Caribbean nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic have been rising since 2006, the U.S. State Department says.

And smugglers are now crossing the Atlantic Ocean in order to move cocaine through Africa and into Europe.

"For a while, they've been pushing small amounts (across the Atlantic) to test the system and see how it works. But they seem to have reached a breakthrough," said Douglas Farah, an expert on smuggling at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, a Washington think tank.

In September, U.S. prosecutors said they had uncovered a smuggling ring, dubbed simply the Organization, that used as many as six airplanes to carry cocaine from Venezuela to West Africa. There is no radar over the ocean, so such flights are virtually undetectable.

Pilots were paid $200,000 to $300,000 per trip, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said in an affidavit, citing informants and undercover agents.

One of the Organization's planes was caught in Sierra Leone in July 2008 with more than 1,320 pounds of cocaine on board. The crew members and their local contacts - three Colombians, two Mexicans, two Venezuelans and a man from Guinea-Bissau - were convicted in Sierra Leone in April and extradited to the United States.

The arrest followed two similar cocaine busts, one of a Venezuelan plane that had landed in Mauritania, on Africa's western coast, and another of a plane about to take off for Africa from Venezuela, though it is unclear whether the same gang was responsible.

In 2009, the Organization bought a cargo airplane in Moldova that is capable of carrying 7 tons of cocaine at a time, the DEA says.

The gang planned to use the plane to drop shipments across West Africa using satellite-navigation coordinates. African gangs would then smuggle the drugs into Europe.

Other smugglers apparently have the same idea. On Nov. 2, tribesmen found the burned-out hulk of a Boeing 727 parked in the sand in the Gao region of Mali. There were empty barrels of fuel nearby.

Investigators believe the plane came from Venezuela and was used to smuggle drugs, Alexandre Schmidt, regional director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, told a news conference on Nov. 16, according to the Agence France-Presse news service. The Republic could not reach Schmidt for comment.

In December, Antonio Maria Costa, head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, called the discovery of the 727 "a new example of the links between drugs, crime and terrorism."

"Drug trafficking in the region is taking on a whole new dimension," Costa told members of the U.N. Security Council.